Evocative and engaging, with a protagonist determined to keep the aloha spirit in her heart.
A historical novel traces the struggles of a woman of Spanish descent who is adopted by a Hawaiian family in Honolulu.
In 1922, at the age of 7, Dolores becomes a hānai, the Hawaiian term for a child informally adopted by another family. Her father is taking her 9-year-old brother, Pablo, and moving to California, where he hopes to find a job. Her mother died several years earlier, and her father believes Dolores is too young to work on the mainland. But Noelani, Dolores’ adoptive mother, knows better. She assigns the little girl to laundry duty, an arduous task for a child. Noelani and her husband, Kanoa, have 10 children, most of them hānai, plus she takes in laundry and gets ironing jobs from the Army base. Despite her overwhelming feelings of abandonment and ever present physical exhaustion, Dolores finds a friend in Maria, Noelani’s 17-year-old hānai daughter; they become as close as true sisters. From Maria, Dolores learns the Hawaiian philosophy of aloha, which means, among other things, “mutual regard and affection,” extending “warmth in caring with no obligation in return.” “Love those around you,” Maria tells her. “The aloha spirit will keep you strong even if you don’t love what people do.” Dolores will hold on to these words even after she moves to California following the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Ulleseit’s novel was inspired by the true story of her husband’s grandmother. The poignant and atmospheric tale captures the pre–World War II diversity of Hawaiian culture, a melting pot of religions and ethos influenced by the Native Hawaiians, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, and Haole (whites). The aromas, tastes, and gentle breezes of Honolulu permeate pages inflected with prose that makes liberal use of Hawaiian terminology. But the story is mostly a celebration of the exceptional strength of a simple woman, unbroken by her difficult life and abusive marriage and committed to providing her two daughters with the stability and sense of family that was missing from her own childhood.
Evocative and engaging, with a protagonist determined to keep the aloha spirit in her heart. (glossary)Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63152-723-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: May 8, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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